If you're thinking -
I am excellent at logo design where should I go to display my artwork?
I am great with flash and have made tons of illustration, where can I display my work and get potential clients?

Pixish is your answer!

Pixish says

There are several assignments from people from different walks of life. One person wanted a tattoo design and the designer will get a monetary award and the person will get the tattoo done and send a picture. LeeLefever the Principal of commoncraft.com has opened an assignment for a T-shirt design which will be sold on his site. I love their site and I might have a few ideas up my sleeve for a good design for them.

This helps in getting the creative people online to submit, judge, and source amazing images which will be useful to your business. Some of the assignments online include - home page image for a site called Tatango.com, clip manager icons from Luk Dhondt, Barrack Obama illustrations etc.

The rewards are pretty interesting too. Some reward in cash while others provide gift vouchers.

I'm very excited about this platform and will be visiting it regularly to see if I can get my creative juices put to some practical use.

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Shading and drawings first come to mind when we think of pencil art. But the notion of using pencil for model construction is unique. Doing it with 100s of 1-inch pencils is incredible. This brilliant work of pencil art was created by Jennifer Maestre who drew her inspiration from Sea Urchins. 

Check her website here

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From the makers of Dog, the incredible walking/running robot, comes Rise, the wall climbing robot.



To quote Boston dynamics:

RiSE is a small six-legged robot that climbs vertical terrain such as walls, trees and fences. RiSE’s feet have claws, micro-claws or sticky material, depending on the climbing surface. RiSE changes posture to conform to the curvature of the climbing surface and a fixed tail helps RiSE balance on steep ascents. RiSE is about 0.25 m long, weighs 2 kg, and travels 0.3 m/s.

Each of RiSE’s six legs is powered by two electric motors. An onboard computer controls leg motion, manages communications, and services a variety of sensors. The sensors include an inertial measurement unit, joint position sensors for each leg, leg strain sensors and foot contact sensors.

Future versions of RiSE will use dry adhesion to climb sheer vertical surfaces such as glass and metal. Boston Dynamics is developing RiSE in conjunction with researchers at University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, Stanford, and Lewis and Clark University. RiSE is funded by the DARPA Defense Sciences Office.

If you like robots, be sure to check out Boston dynamics big dog here

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Social networking is seeping in to every aspect of our life. Orkut, Facebook, Jaiku so on so forth, people are not getting tired of these things. So what is the next big thing? Some time back I wrote about microblogging and mobileblogging, which I feel is amazing and we've got so much to explore in that realm, but what about video.

We all watch video, we all leave our comments at the bottom of the youtube videos. What if we could put those comments on top of the videos for every audience to see. That's exactly what Omnisio does. Allows you to put your thoughts on other people's video. And guess who's acquired Omnisio? Yes online giant recently acquired Omnisio. Here is an example of the comments that can be added to a video on Omnisio.




I don't personally like the tags, but I do see an option to watch the video without annotations, which is quite cool. Youtube already has this feature integrated. It makes the video more interactive and allows your video to lead to various other videos. I've taken a video here and modified it a little using the annotations tool. I've linked it to other videos that talk about the topic. It was very easy to use and didn't take any time to finish.



I like the new annotation feature. I may not allow everyone to comment on my videos but loved the fact I could add those comments online and link them.

Moo Score - MOOOO/MOOOOO

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Ever wished you could do away with all the chargers and their cables for all the gadgets you own? Fret not, for help is here. Witricity - a portmanteau for wireless electricity is the technology that will make your life easier. While it might sound like a new cool thing, it actually is not. The technology has been around for quite some time now but hasn't been very popular.

WiTricity works on the principle of mutual induction, the same technology that drives transformers used for power distrubtion. In layman's terms, mutual induction help transfer power from one electrical circuit to another without physical contact (by means of wires). For this to work, like how it does in transformers, the parts of the 2 circuits involved are closely coupled. Hence distance between the 2 circuits is the limiting factor. If you consider your wall charger as one circuit and your mobile phone as another, there will be limits to how far the devices can be for the phone to be charged. This distance is what researchers are trying to increase to make the technology more practical and wide spread.

Intel recently demonstrated advances in this field at the Intel developer conference that happened last week. They were able to power a 60-watt light bulb from a power source that was 2 meters (7 feet) away at around 40% efficiency. The technology is expected to gain wide spread adoption in another 3-5 years. Till then we are stuck with cables.



Find more details here and here.

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Hacker News is THE website for all your web startup resources. If you are planning on starting a new web based business, this is the place to be. You get advices of all sorts to get started with a startup. There are frequent top 10 lists about startups, discussions on new startups, information on funding, idea sharing etc. Most startup discussions are web based. Also lot of technical resources with regard to hosting websites, programming etc are discussed.

Articles are submitted by readers and are ranked on the basis of popularity using a voting system.
Submitted articles have comments which are are good place to discuss the article. If you are looking for a place to hang around and gather good information about going around and implementing that great web idea of your's, you now know where to go.

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As the ATF fuel (ATF - Aviation Turbine Fuel commonly called Jet fuel) skyrockets (pun intended) the prices for all the fares have increased tremendously. There has been 20% drop in the weekly flight schedule since March 2008 (source - economictimes.indiatimes.com)

To add to this, the newer airports like Hyderabad and Bangalore are levying hefty airport duty (yet to come but in the pipeline or so I've heard). And above all, the travel to the airport which is now outside the city and takes about an hour to get to, has put off passengers from flying anywhere. So what are our alternatives?

The railways is monopolized by the Indian Government and booking is primarily done directly by waiting at the booking places and if online from irctc.co.in. Many people I know (including me) are giving the good ol' bus another look. Here are the top 7 sites for booking your road trip.


Ticketvala.com - Ticketvala claims to be India's largest Online Bus Ticket platform. They have a special feature called the mTicket which allows a passenger to receive a confirmation of your booking on your mobile and this confirmation acts as your boarding pass. They have quite a few payment channels, and last minute booking. You can contact their call centre for tickets and even have your tickets delivered at your doorstep. Home delivery is available in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune, for those outside this region, you'll have to wait a while till ticketvala comes to your home.

Apart from this they provide other services like car hire, bus hire and budget hotels listing. An ideal list for the budget traveler.

Ticketkaran.in - This Chennai based website says its the first to provide frequent traveler program for Bus travelers (step aside jet gold members). This site too offers mobile phone confirmation of your ticket and the ease of booking your ticket by phone by calling their booking room. The site offers delivery for nominal chargers to most locations in Chennai.

This site is brand new (as are most sites on this list). Only once testimonials and other features are added will we understand how useful this site really is.

Redbus.in - This was the first site I'd heard of that allows online bus booking. Its been there for 2 years now. This site has by far the largest number of bus travel operators and spans to more than 80 cities in India. It offers all the services provided by the other sites, like home delivery (at a nominal fee in major cities), mobile booking etc. There are 3 things I adore about this site:

- First the localization with the Indic language translations (5 of them).

- Second the Testimonials page, people have enjoyed the service and great service never goes unnoticed. There have been tonnes of suggestions appreciations and love letters that this site has recieved. I especially like - I think redBus is the right answer for all our travel related problems. The options available at your website are very comprehensive. - Nageshwara Rao K - Well said Nageshwara.

- Third and not the least, there is a little link under the booking section that says "Boss is watching? Look busy." It takes you to some random excel page with numbers and charts. I couldn't believe it. Good job redbus!

TakeOffTrip.com - One of the quickest sites I've seen in the group. Very quick results and crisp layout just draws you in to the site. Once you're in you're hooked. The site has amazing user engagement with trivia during on the loading screen if the loading is slow etc. There aren't too many special features for bus passengers like mobile booking and home delivery of tickets. The site is a complete travel site and bus is just another service they provide. They also have a train link but I guess its still under construction. I can't wait to find out what this feature does.

CheckOutTrip.com - Again a Hyderabad based site. Its more of a Online travel agent as opposed to specifically for bus passengers. The site is still not up and running completely. The site looks like it needs a lot more work before users will like navigating through it. Quite a disappointment at this point of time. Would love to see how this pans out. Fingers crossed for you checkouttrip.com

Bus-tickets.rediff.com - Rediff bus tickets gives you more than one solution to your problem. They have a tie up with the Indian railways. On the search result page, apart from getting the bus details from major Government and Local bus operators it shows the possible trains that leave during the same day between the locations selected. Allowing you to compare the prices of the bus and train ticket and the indianrail.gov website is just a click away. Fast easy effective - truly impressed.

Bustickets.makemytrip.co.in - Makemytrip is slow, I know I don't have the fastest connection under the sun, but makemytrip takes forever to show results. Once it did show up on the page, it had some very competitive results. Makemytrip as a brand has a lot of patrons already. Personally not my favorite site for Online bus reservations.

Apart from these sites, there is Raj National, KPN, VRL direct from the Bus operators themselves.

I hope this helps you find a good site to book your next bus ticket. I personally will either book it on redbus.in, ticketvala.com or Bus-tickets.rediff.com. Will post some review on my experience soon.

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I like listening to Bollywood music and with less scraping from the west these days we have some really cool Indian artists. (Bollywood music is very very rare- mostly listen to Pop and Rock from the West)

I've looked up a few sites that have Radio/music streaming online and I'm going to write one my favorite.

in.com is a network 18 venture. Currently in beta, this portal offers you music, videos, games, a cool search tool, and mail. They say "Give us your name and we'll give you a short @in.com email address." So I did and now we have topicbean@in.com. The mail service gives you 10GB mailbox, linked messages to track the thread easily, mail scheduler to post pone your mail etc etc.


I am going off tangent here (as always). The mail service of in.com is good - lets move on to their music offering. They have the Artist of the week, Podcast, News and Record Labels.

The Artist of the week is Shankar Mahadevan, they have his songs in many languages and the streaming is really really quick. I don't have the fastest internet connection, but in spite of that the song started immediately and had amazing sound quality.

I listened to the Movies you should see podcast and listened to Trivia about The Green Mile. This isn't my favorite podcast of all times but was interesting (polite way of saying - NOT GOOD AT ALL). But all that they were saying was pretty clear.

Moving swiftly on to the News - This page took a long long time to load framed another site which was all garbled and i couldn't read a thing and couldn't see a think either. Was a terrible terrible experience.

Finally I looked at the record labels and there were tons of music which I really enjoyed. They had Tips, Venus, T-Series, Times Music. I listened to Independent artists - End Song from the album Blue Bugyal by Summit Attempt. It was relaxing to listen to such music after a long day and enjoyed every minute of it. I was so impressed by the music that I had to admire the musician and I posted a comment and read the following disclaimer -

"Don't post rude or nasty comments. Ethnic slurs, personal insults and abuses are rather uncool. Criticise, but know where to draw the line. No point putting in personal details or links, we won't publish them. Try and write in English and please stick to the point! "

This was great to see. Finally a site which will sieve through the garbled rubbish before posting it online. I stand impressed by In.com

Something you should definitely check out.

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I couldn't stop laughing when I read about this site on Lifehacker. The site Diaroogle.com is about to help those needy New Yorkers find the nearest possible loo to relieve themselves.

I think this is a brilliant idea. The owners of the site wanted to use poogle.com instead of Diaroogle.com but weren't able to get the name.

I am sure this will help out all the desperate people out there looking for a hygenic place to download. I will be happy if such loo's come to India. Something better then the Sulabh's we have. I wouldn't mind having such a website for us out here too!

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